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The risk I see in all this is putting a windows page file on such a drive that is actually used. Or an Oracle rollback tablespace or redo logfiles. These will get this kind of drive into "used-status" in no time. Not to speak of the 10.000x erase limit.

As another guy said before, the difference between SLC and MLC is not to be neglected. Reply

Something I have noticed under win 7 RC x64 on my laptop is that when running on battery only the system boots up and shuts down faster than when on ac alone. I don't know why yet and this is especially revelant as even with the slightly lesser ssd's - basically non-intel - can improve laptop performance/responsiveness twofold vs. 7200rpm platter hdd's (as shown in the intial x25-m review). As far as the running on battery variable is concerned, my average shut down time on ac power is 17 seconds, and on battery it is 10 seconds (or less). Is there maybe something else going on in windows 7 that is an unknown as of now?
Yes, after enjoying the initial review of the X25-M I had to spend about an hour to see where my platter hdd stood (and I'm sure I'm not the only one here that did so). Reply

The Intel seems to own it at almost everything except a few writing cases. However the theoretical 180 MB/s Write doesn't seem to show up in anything but synthetic benchmarks which STILL makes it even with the X25-M in real world performance. Not to mention the Vertex's seem to still have major performance degradations compared to X25-M's loss.

As always, my comments to your previous article should have waited until I had read the latest on these drives. However, X25 is the best (for now) and in some cases arguably cheaper/Gb. Once again a great article follow-up. Reply

Thank you so much for your honest and concise articles on SSDs lately! This is the most important hardware change that the tech world has seen in a long time. There are a lot of bits that need to be uncovered so that the public knows what they are getting themselves into. You're doing an outstanding job of protecting the consumer since manufacturers are definitely producing SSD products at the moment with no regard for the consumer! Reply

I DO commend you for all this research you've been doing, and your articles are full of some very informative information, and I also appreciate the comments section here where people can post their opinions as well, as I find that it is nice to see more opinions from people and other professionals who can also share their knowledge and expertise into the collective.

The only problem I have is how, in most of your SSD comparisons, you seem to compare apples with oranges a lot regarding the differences between SLC and MLC drives. It is a known factor, that MLC can only endure 10,000 writes per cell. And SLC can handle x10 of that. This is not some small amount. This is a significant difference. Not worth throwing aside. When I read your articles and they repeatedly profess that the Intel X-whatever-it-was drive is cream-of-the-crop holy-grail of all things, it just makes me wonder if you could be receiving payoffs from Intel to say such things. I can see where in the performance arena, it looks as though the popular Intel drive shines, but cost-wise, it does not, and reliability-wise, I don't see how any MLC drive can stand up to an SLC drive, period. Unless of course you could explain to me how this would be possible. I DO love Intel-based products, as I have built many servers using pure Intel parts, and I have a high regard for Intel for building reliable servers, but I just can't get past the whole MLC / SLC thing when it comes to reliability. For me, reliability is very important, as well as performance. I continually hear little remarks stating that the Samsungs just don't measure up, performance-wise, but you never mention much about the lifespan/endurance of SLC. At least I've never heard much mentioned about it. How about an article to compare various SSD drive's endurances and lifespans? If speed is the builder's main issue, then why not use top-performing, reliable SLC SSD pairs in RAID 0 or multiple SSD drives in RAID 5 or other configurations to get your speed, and reliability in one package? I just don't see how 10,000 writes of MLC is cream-of-the-crop, when the Samsung (for example) SLC drive is rated at 2,000,000 MTBF (that is much more than even a typical server-grade HDD which is typically around 1.2 million hours MTBF). Also, the last Samsung drive I bought only cost $175 bucks, and last I checked, the Intel one is around twice that. For the cheaper cost of a Samsung or similar SLC, and the proven reliability of one of them, you COULD actually run them in RAID (Redundant Array of INEXPENSIVE Drives) configurations and have the best of all worlds, plus get your big size back that MLC's typically brag about. Imagine a RAID 5 array with a fast controller and perhaps 5-10 SLC Samsung or similar drives. When they DO slow down after becoming well-used, they still are faster than HDD. So what's the big problem? I would just like to see more talk about the other factors that may influence a buyer to drift toward SLC or MLC. That is my main point. Sorry for the long rant, and I will accept all bashes. Thx

Maybe you can shed some light on these issues I have, but I would say, that it might be helpful if when you post articles about SSD drives, you should also conduct more comparisons reflecting the SLC/MLC related differences, and more comparisons which test reliability, and lifespan, in addition to performance. The reader needs to know about these things as well, in order to make an informed decision on which drive he may want to buy.

By the way, I am just writing this comment as an enthusiast. I am not a rep of any company that cares about SSD. These are just my personal opinions. Reply

As I understand it, if there is a good amount of spare space on the MLC SSD (that is, compared to the amount of the drive actually being rewritten to regularly), the wear-levelling routines will prevent the block write limitation of MLCs ever being an issue (other than a possible gradual reduction in capacity). Only if the drive is full enough to run out of blocks that can be swapped in to write to, will reliability be affected.

Some servers may just tip the scales. Most consumer use would have the majority of drive space being write occasionaly, read mostly, with a few small areas getting higher write traffic that would easily be compensated for by having a few spare GB.

However, I wonder if the wear-levelling routines might be contributing to the observed slowdown, perhaps due to the need to consult ever-growing usage-mapping tables that are themselves subject to wear-levelling. It depends how invasive the wear-levelling code is within the write code. Reply

Anand, if at all possible try and mix in the recent Samsung 256GB SSD with it's new controller into your testing to see how it compares. While it isn't in the retail channel it is coming down through OEM's and folks buying new laptops are provided the option (like Dell and the 256GB SSD, etc.). So many of us making laptop purchases would benefit from seeing how this great bargain compares.

I'm not paying more for a high end retail SSD than the actual laptop, but I would consider get an inexpensive high end SSD with more storage as an add on for half the price of it's retail counterparts.

For a long time SSD's just had too many compromises, today for a laptop they are starting to make sense if one is willing to pay a little extra, but $800 is too much extra for a 160GB x-25M when a Samsung 256GB SSD is less than half the price on a new laptop purchase.

So it looks like Intel will fix the x-25m issues with a new firmware, no doubt other mfr's can do the same over time. Reply

Yes, I keep checking AnandTech every day in hope to see a review and/or a comparison to the very interesting new 256GB Samsung PB22-J (MMDOE56G5MXP-0VB) with stated R/W speeds of 220MBps/200MBps respectively. It can be purchased in a very attractive price via OEM channels.
I am sure most of the SSD articles' readers would be more than happy to have this information here, Anand.

Not only AT saved my hard earned money by showing the problems with the Jmicrons SSDs- i was about to pull the triger over the OCZ Core SSD, but the last article closed the deal on the OCZ Vertex. Anandtech has been my favorite hardware site for the last 3 years but my respect has gone skyhigh with the SSDs series of articles. It is not about making good reviews for the company that pays the most, it is about writing reviews that force the companies to offer a better product. Reply

But I am left dumbfounded by OCZ's decision to share the firmware with competitors. Sure in a perfect world it is nice and snuggl-ly, but they have to be losing market-share, if not now once other manufacturers begin selling competing products. I'm glad they did it for competition (and thus cheaper prices for us consumers) but I just see it as a relatively stupid business move... Reply

If Indilinx made the decision to do it off their own bat, OR it is not subject to a subcontracting agreement (that is, doing the firmware exclusively for OCZ), then they are free to offer it to all and sundry.

In some industries, even though specific customers pay for changes, they are made available to all customers after a delay period.

With Anand's huge article and other articles, it's clear that the sequential read/write thoroughput doesn't matter so much - all SSDs, even the notorious JMicron series, can do a good job on that metric. What is relevant to our daily use is the random write rate. Latencies and IOs/second are the most important metric in the realm of SSD.

Based on that, I would suggest Anand (and other Tech reporters) to include a real world test of evaluating the Random Write performance for SSD. Because current real-world tests: booting windows, loading games, rendering 3D, etc. they focus on the random read. However, measuring how long it takes to install Windows, Microsoft Visual Studio, or a 4-GB PC Game would thoroughly test the Random Write / Latency performance. I think this is a good complementary of our current testing methodology Reply

I don't know if I missed it in the article, but I didn't notice the reason for the degradation.

Is it:

a. Faults in the firmware

b. Faults in the controller

c. Faults in the flash devices themselves, or

d. Progressive increase in the proportion of the SSD blocks that need erasing before rewrite?

To me, it seems that it might be d, especially when using sectors that are small compared to the SSD native block size.

I would be interested to see results for the same tests using 64kB sectors on all drives. For normal files (OS, apps and data), that would increase the space wastage by 8%, but is negligible for multimedia (where the file size is very large compared to the sector size).

I would expect such a change may well produce better overall performance as it would reduce the multiple full block rewrites that result from changes to multiple small files in the same block.

Some rough benchmarking I have done showed a 50% better real world copying of 1GB of files of various sizes between HDD drives compared to using default Vista sector sizes.

If the random write performance is better with larger block sizes, some wastage might be a small price to pay. We have been used to the compromises in using HDDs for so long that compensating for some SSDs downsides should be allowed.

My main interest in using SSDs is for a quiet and cooler Digial Audio Workstation (DAW). I currently have four 150GB WD Raptors making noise and over 40W of heat (requiring more noisy fans). A lot of planning and effort goes into optimising the HDD usage and partitioning.

And now some modern software sampled instruments are hundreds of GB that need fast, responsive storage media. Streaming hundreds of sample streams at once, I would expect HDDs to be spending most of their time seeking. SSDs would seem to be the solution for this, in that they have very short access times, allowing many more accesses per second, coupled with fast read times (to allow getting to the next stream faster). Reading does not seem to have any of the issues giving SSDs bad press.

However, having fast, silent drives for OSs (need multi-boot with one tweaked for audio performance) and projects (which have multiple read streams and simultaneous writes when recording) would complete the quiet profile. Reply

Not to put OCZ down as I wish for them to continue to be a contender and to bring on competition (it's good economics), but...

for some reason it just seems like there is a little too much butt-kissing ever since the first article. Granted final points are made, but the first article was so objective and true. If you put out a crap product, then sales should drop. Anand, despite your relations with the manufacturers, if they want to stop sending you products, it's on them.

You can just wait til retail versions to review them, but the truth is the readers are going to side with you and not buy a product they don't know much about. Reply

yeah I noticed a little butt-kissing going on, but I understand it, since OCZ was totally trashed by Anand regarding the whole Jmicron story so this kind of makes up for it, don't you think?
It's good that OCZ recognised its errors and listened to customers and reviewers, and this has to be acknowledged to them
Reply

I've read your articles about SSD with great interest and enjoyed the in-depth reviewing very very much.

Now with this update all I asked myself when seeing the headline was: Does it stutter (again)? You do mention random write performance but the maximum latency for random 4kb writes isn't stated at all. You were dwelling on that part so extensively in the other article that I thought it might have been a good idea to have it updated here. Please, pretty please, with sugar on top ;) let us know about it. Why else should we pay the extra cash to get the Intel...

One other thing also: You had a comment in that other article about the method of simulating the "used" drives - did you also fill up the spare blocks this time? Because the comment says, that it would bias the test results towards the Intel drive.

All in all no biggies, and I hope you continue to do these amazing reviews for a long time!

I recently told my roommate I read AnandTech and have been doing so for years (about 6 or so now). He told me about how he went to high school with him (he is from Raleigh, NC) and was driving Porsches back then, handing out freebies from all the stuff he got to friends, bought his parents a home, etc..

I don't hold it against the guy, but he is making some extremely serious bank from the site when he is one of the original computer hardware review sites. Reply

Also not sure where those prices came from, as cheapest PriceGrabber finds the X25-M 80GB is $359, for $4.49/GB. The Vertex 120GB seems to be the best deal at the moment, at $2.91/GB before rebate, $2.66/GB after. Reply

Anand your SSD coverage has been second to none. I trust your reviews more than anyone elses on the web but it sure would be nice to see real-world power consumption figures for SSDs as this is an important factor in notebooks.

They probably are OK for some scenarios, but you can still blame the companies for using them in a manner they are not really fit for. If some company started selling 15"+ laptops for several hundred dollars using Atom processors, you wouldn't blame Intel for making the Atom, but the company for misusing it. Reply

Unfortunately I had not read about the issue when I read you fantastic article on the Vertex, which made me buy a couple of X-25Ms for my machine.

I contacted Intel through support right now after reading they might have a fix for the issue the drive has under Bootcamp on one of the new Macs with nVidia chipsets. They aren't answering (yet), do you have some color on the fix though ? Reply

imo, flash memory is going to be pretty big this year and the coming years. I'm already anticipating very high capacity flash memory since the technology is already there to push it up to 2TB. It's just a matter of time, cost and market to be able to get to those levels. As for SSD I think it's picking up but not as quickly as most had hoped for, myself included. And again, IMO, I think SSD technology is still in the infant stages where there are still lots of improvements to be made. Speed (write/read) and capacities are the two major ones of course. Reply

2 very nice articles regarding ssd, although i am not so convinced what to buy, ocz or intel one, since both have similar performance in real world apps i believe it is more a price discussion.

the one thing i miss in both reviews, is the failure rates, the burn in rate and the way they prevent the burn in by more capacity then rated, write, mixture, etc.....

Afterall that is one of the main reason why many large storage vendors are still offering this solution as a second line-up (except for the prcie/gb offcourse and the issue that few of those disks kill there global controller performance)

With this latest firmware update I would not be pulling the trigger on the Intel drive. Unless there are some serious defects with the latest Vertex firmware, 2 drives in RAID0 have to be superior in performance, not to mention the extra capacity.

I would definitely wait, but not for the Intel drive, but rather for the confirmation the latest firmware for the Vertex is solid. Reply

Dunno, that difference in random writes (1st graph page 3) seems more than RAID would help. Combine that with the face that I have never had a good experience with onboard RAID and never seen it make a large difference in real-life timing, if Intel dropped their price to something closer to the OCZ I'd rather stich to a single drive (though the fact that Intel doesn't really have a drive capacity that suits my needs well doesn't help either). Reply

It wouldn't be 1-2 months for the next generation Intel SSD drives. The previous SSD roadmaps indicate the 34nm SSDs at Q4 of this year. We might see the rumored 120MB/s firmware for X25-M though. Whether it can be updated to support the older firmware drives is another question. Reply

yes i have to agree, this updating on the ssd situation has been invaluable to me too. you hear good things on the forums about the new firmwares and it's so good to see you share how things have changed even since last week. Reply

Should destroy the Intel drive in all real-world tests. All it takes is to look at a single Vertex drive with the new firmware to see it is within ~1 second load time, and already significantly faster with copying larger files. Honestly, Intel should be scared to death of this bugger, or else they realize they milked the teat for as long as possible without competition, and can now drop the price inline with OCZ and Supertalent. Reply

Some two weeks ago I reports that Super Talent had an Indilinix based drive on the market. Was surprised at the lack of information. Nice to finally see details surfacing. A product with such potential has been poorly marketed to this point in my opinion.

Props to OCZ for their work in getting Vertex up to speed. Many have been critical that they rushed the product to market. Yea it sucks that flashing destroys data; but look at mobo manufacturers. We should be used to bug fixes through firmware updates. Intel needed some form of competition.. good for everyone.

I flashed my Vertex 60GB to 1275 without issue. It's a simple process. Would like to see instructions on something other than a forum post however. How about a .pdf to accompany the files.. Reply

One thing I missed in your articles though is alignment and its importance for performance. The drives ship with a partition on it and it's supposed to be aligned, but the partition on my drive seems to be off, as I only got about 195/75 MB/s read/write max on ATTO when it was "new" and like 105/35 MB/s now that it is "used". I have yet to re-install the drive and properly align it, but either I have a defective drive or this is caused by alignment, making proper alignment extremely important. I'm on the 0122 FW btw.

Another thing I missed is RAID1, you do not mention it at all. You can basically get 2 Super Talent 60GB drives for the price of an Intel 80GB and use them in RAID1. This will still have lower random 4KB performance, but the increased performance in many other areas should be dramatically higher than the Intel's.
I have never used RAID1 though, but I would love to hear your opinion on this, as I'm considering getting a second 60GB OCZ. Reply

I'm sure you're also going to give mass exposure and some amazing feedback to a small company like Indilinx and hopefully they can gather more resources (people/money) and further improve their products. And pointing out Jmicron's "garbage" (haha). Dhanvyavaad. Reply